Skip to main content

Lambeth Cemetery

Records from the London Borough of Lambeth's Lambeth Cemetery in south London are now available to view on www.deceasedonline.com

Lambeth Cemetery, originally known as Tooting Cemetery, is home to a great many species of wildlife, including goldcrests, sparrowhawks, and woodpeckers, and provides the final resting place for over 250,000 people, including many famous music hall Victorians.

Lambeth Cemetery

The music hall was a popular Victorian brand of theatrical entertainment, and involved songs, comedy, speciality acts, and variety entertainment. 

One giant figure of music hall was George Wild Galvin, better known as Dan Leno (1860-1904), who was buried in Lambeth Cemetery. Dan Leno was a leading comedian and musical actor within music hall, and was also well known for his pantomime dame roles. His first solo stage appearance was at nine years old and, as a teen, he became the star of his family's act. By the late 1800s, Dan Leno was one of the highest-paid and most popular comedians in the world and, in 1901, he performed a sketch for King Edward VII at Sandringham, who was thoroughly impressed. 

Leno was generous and charitable, particularly to the benefit of other performers in need, but increasing alcoholism and widespread rejection of his desires to become a serious dramatic actor led to a mental breakdown in 1903. He was committed to an asylum, to be treated by a Dr. Savage with 'peace and quiet and a little water colouring'. He was discharged later that year and performed again, but from there, his health further declined and he died in November 1904 aged only 43.

We would love to hear of any of your ancestors or other interesting people whose records you have found in the collection. Do leave a comment in the box below, or contact us via our Facebook or Twitter pages!

The photograph above was gratefully sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Author Irid Escent kindly shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

London's Spa Fields

Deceased Online has just uploaded around 114,000 burial records from Spa Fields in the modern London borough of Islington Spa Fields today, with the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in the background Spa Fields Burial Ground became notorious in the 19th century for its overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Located in the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, the grave yard was not far from the ever-increasing City of London. Spa Fields was known also as Clerkenwell Fields and Ducking-pond Fields in the late 18th century, hinting at a dark side to what was then a summer evening resort for north Londoners. What would become a cemetery was a ducking pond in the rural grounds of a Spa Fields public house. It was here in 1683 that six children were drowned while playing on the ice. In his History of Clerkenwell (1865) William J. Pinks wrote that visitors, "came hither to witness the rude sports that were in vogue a century ago, such as duck-hunting, prize-fighting, bull-baiting

Haslar and Netley Military Hospital Cemeteries

Following on from last week's post, I'm looking further into Deceased Online 's latest collection of burials. These military burials were digitized in partnership with The National Archives .  Two notable institutions in the collection are Haslar Royal Navy Cemetery and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley. Both Haslar and Netley (as it was more commonly known) were Britain's foremost military hospitals during the bloodiest years of war in the western hemisphere The Royal Hospital Haslar and Clayhill Royal Navy Cemetery, Gosport, Hampshire The Royal Hospital Haslar dates from 1753. For over two hundred and fifty years Haslar served as one of main hospitals caring for sailors and marines of the Royal Navy and merchant services. Patients came from ships as well as from naval and seamen institutions in nearby Portsmouth and Gosport. The hospital closed as the last official military hospital in 2007. The Haslar Cemetery closed in April 1859 but the neighbouring Cl

Wakefield Collection: Cremation Records now available on Deceased Online

Records for both crematoria in Wakefield, Yorkshire have been added to the Deceased Online database Above: Pontefract Crematorium The two sets of crematoria records have been added to Deceased Online 's Wakefield Collection .  Wakefield district contains nineteen cemeteries and two crematoria. Many of the records go back to the mid and late 19th century when the cemeteries opened, and range across a wide geographical area. The full list of  Wakefield  cemeteries live on Deceased Online,  with opening dates in brackets,   is as follows: 1.  Altofts Cemetery  – Church Road, Altofts, Normanton  (1878)   2.  Alverthorpe Cemetery  – St Paul’s Drive, Alverthorpe, Wakefield  (registers from 1955) 3. Castleford Cemetery  – Headfield Road, Castleford  (1857) 4.  Crigglestone Cemetery  – Standbridge Lane, Crigglestone, Wakefield  (1882) 5. Featherstone Cemetery  – Cutsyke Road, North Featherstone  (1874) 6. Ferrybridge Cemetery  – Pontefract Road, Ferrybridge, P